ATCP, LLC

In this article I talked about my 6 D’s of projects, objectives, goals, sales, designs, etc. For this short article I’ll do a little follow-up to explain another aspect of the same methodology.

There are only 2 buckets that any sale or project ever falls into:

Business Need – They want something they don’t have.

Business Solution – They have something they don’t want.

Based on whichever you are presented with, my 6 D’s will produce something different. Let’s look at each:

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One example illustrates how my methodologies help secure business. On my blog I focus on Sales Engineering, and bettering the profession. In this article I discuss the importance of methodologies in the sales process, and one of my high level methodologies. This methodology alone secured the largest proserv engagement in Sprint’s history ($4.5M), and was directly attributable, per the prospect, to my methodologies. You know when you’ve done this properly when at the the start of the signing the prospect leans over and asks me which page he/she needs to sign. :)

Prospects don’t want the lowest price. They want the best value-just like you and I do when shopping. Sales Engineers are in the justification game. Anything, regardless of the price, that can be justified will be purchased. It is our job to do just that.

As for presentations, I routinely create custom flash animations in place of static PowerPoint decks (why are we still putting prospects through PowerPoint?). These serve many purposes that have secured business for our account team in the past:
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Over the years I’ve heard a lot of sales professionals use these three terms incorrectly, so lets fix that now.

Demo
This is our software, with our data, and our use case(s).

Demos are used only after the opportunity is properly qualified. Showing a demo before the prospect is qualified leads to confusion. No demo will sell software. Seriously.
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I’ve written so many emails about this that I think I should put the info down in a blog article and simply refer models to it! The following is first person:

Clothing
I will tell you not to plan on anything ‘busy’ to wear. You need solids, and preferably nothing the same color as any desired background. Black and white are winners, as is a variety of jewelry. This holds true for both kinds of shoots.
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Qualification is simply the transition from [unqualified] prospect to [qualified] opportunity. In the pipeline/funnel, this means that all the things that are needed for this prospect to want/need/desire our product and services are there.

More specifically, qualification involves an opportunity possessing all of the following:

1. Access to the buyer
2. The prospect knows, and agrees to, what they are buying from us
3. The prospect knows, and agrees to, the approximate cost of the solution or DSO (Discreet Sales Opportunity)
4. There is DRM (Date Related Motivation), or what some people call a “pending event”
5. [optionally] An identified project or budget line item set aside for the proposed solution

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